Cox-Thurmond Family

Wow! An Earthquake!

April 18, 2008

Amy called me in the middle of the night again...
This time it was at about 2:40 AM MDT, I think.
She says "Jim, the house was shaking! I could hear the roof rattling!"

This didn't sound like cats, or raccoons playing on the deck.
It didn't even sound like a burglar creeping around downstairs.
After a few minutes of waking up and thinking, I remembered the
New Madrid fault.
I said "Well, it could have been an earthquake."

In southern Indiana, that's crazy talk, and will get you looked at funny.
But it's true - two of the three strongest quakes known to have occurred
in the continental U.S. happened in southeast Missouri,
near a tiny place called New Madrid.
These were 10 times stonger than the 1906 San Fransisco quake,
measuring 8.0 and 8.1 on the Richter scale, according to most estimates.
Estimates, because they happened in 1811 and 1812.

About an hour later she calls to tell me that I was right,
it was an earthquake.
It happened rather far northeast of the normal active zone, too,
so much closer to Bloomington, although still just over the state line in Illinois.
Actually, as is normal, there were several of them,
although only one was strong enough for people in Bloomington to notice.
That one
was at 4:37 AM EDT, and was rated at 5.2 on Richter's scale.

Oddly, I'm a little bit jealous. I've never been in an earthquake.

:-(

Background Image Map

No, not for the first time,
but I'd never really thought about them before today.
I was messing around with
an app at work
that needs them to do pop-up labels on a graph with too many points
for normal labels.

Anyway, it's an interesting problem to update to CSS
and more modern HTML design.
Apparently,
image maps are Old School.
Besides, you can't do one on a background image anyway,
not the old-fashioned way.
So I cobbled together something that works on my moveable background
image (a nice trick if I do say so myself), and uses CSS.
Mouse over the faces!

My Kids Are Going To Be Famous

January, 2011

I posted on Nathaniel's
and Adrian's pages
about their parts in A Christmas Carol last month.
Well, Nattie just got an email from the IU
opera program - they want him to be a 'super' in an upcoming production
of Faust.